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Humphrey's Executor v. United States

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1935 United States Supreme Court case

Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled that the U.S. Constitution allows the U.S. Congress to enact laws limiting the ability of the President of the United States to fire the executive officials of an independent agency that is quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial in nature.

The case involved William E. Humphrey, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had fired in 1933. Roosevelt had fired Humphrey over their policy disagreements involving economic regulation and the New Deal, even though the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 prohibited firing an FTC commissioner for any reason other than "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

Humphrey had served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission since 1925, having been appointed by President Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge's successor, President Herbert Hoover, appointed Humphrey to a second seven-year term in 1931. Humphrey was an outspoken and controversial FTC commissioner. He believed the FTC was oppressively burdening American economic enterprise, and he stridently opposed most of the agency's enforcement actions against businesses and corporations.

When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he was dissatisfied with Humphrey and viewed him as inadequately supportive of the New Deal.[4] Roosevelt twice wrote to Humphrey asking him to resign because his policies did not align with his own, but Humphrey refused.

You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence.

— 

Letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Commissioner William Humphrey (August 31, 1933).[5]

In October 1933, Roosevelt wrote Humphrey a third letter that simply fired him. Nevertheless, Humphrey continued to come to work at the FTC even after he was formally fired.[4] The Federal Trade Commission Act permitted the President to dismiss an FTC member only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Roosevelt's decision to dismiss Humphrey was based solely on political differences, rather than job performance or alleged acts of malfeasance.[7]

William Humphrey died before the Supreme Court could rule on whether his dismissal by the President from the Federal Trade Commission was valid.

Five months after his firing, on February 14, 1934, Humphrey died of a stroke at age 71. After his firing, the FTC had stopped paying Humphrey his salary of $10,000 per year (equivalent to $243,000 in 2024). Samuel Rathbun, the executor of Humphrey's estate, sued the U.S. federal government in the United States Court of Claims. Rathbun claimed that Humphrey's firing had been unlawful and that the federal government therefore owed Humphrey's estate five months of back pay for the period of time between his firing and his death.

Questions presented[edit]

During the course of adjudicating the lawsuit, the Court of Claims issued two certified questions to the U.S. Supreme Court:

  1. "Do the provisions of section 1 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, stating that 'any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office', restrict or limit the power of the President to remove a commissioner except upon one or more of the causes named?"
  2. "If the foregoing question is answered in the affirmative, then—If the power of the President to remove a commissioner is restricted or limited as shown by the foregoing interrogatory and the answer made thereto, is such a restriction or limitation valid under the Constitution of the United States?"

These certified questions were the basis for the Supreme Court's decision.

The government argued that Shurtleff was controlling as to the first question:[1]

It is true, as the legislative history of the Act indicates, that the Commission was intended to be or to become an experienced and informed body...But there is nothing in the language or the legislative history of the Act to suggest that these purposes were thought to require a limitation of the removal power to the causes named. Nor are the Federal Trade Commission and the Board of General Appraisers so unlike in nature as to call for a departure by the Court from the construction given in the Shurtleff case...It is submitted, therefore, that it is a settled recipe of construction that the mere statutory enumeration of causes for which an appointee may be removed does not confine the exercise of the President's power to removal for one or more of those causes...

Citing Myers v. United States as precedent, the government argued, in the alternative, that the Act's for-cause provision would be unconstitutional if it limited the President's general removal power.[1]

Humphrey's Executor argued that the expressio unius rule of statutory construction confirmed the intent of Congress to limit the power of removal to the causes enumerated in the statute.

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of Rathbun and Humphrey's estate, holding that the removal restrictions in the FTC Act did not violate the Constitution.

In an opinion written by Justice George Sutherland, the Court distinguished between executive officers and quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial officers. The Court concluded that Congress had intended to create an independent, non-partisan agency "free from 'political domination or control'" by providing tenure protection to "limit the executive power of removal to the causes enumerated".[9] The FTC was a non-partisan body "which shall be independent of executive authority, except in its selection and free to exercise its judgment without the leave or hindrance of ... any department of the government."

The Court, emphasizing the separation of powers principle, limited Myers v. United States and rejected its dicta that the President has unencumbered removal powers to control areas of legislative authority, such as interstate commerce, without an express delegation of power.[13] The Court's decision limited the President's inherent supervisory power to "purely executive officers".

Subsequent developments[edit]

Conservative justices including William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, and scholars Walter Gellhorn, Theodore J. Lowi and David Schoenbrod, among others, have argued that independent agencies are unaccountable.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB in Seila Law v. CFPB, described Humphrey's Executor as recognizing an exception for non-partisan "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" agencies that have been structured to preserve agency expertise. In Seila Law the court's conservative majority decided that Humphrey's Executor was not a controlling precedent when an agency was vested with significant executive power and led by a single director.[17]

Overturning Humphrey's Executor was seen as a key point in Project 2025. On May 22, 2025, in a 6-3 unsigned order in response to an emergency appeal from Trump, the Supreme Court stayed the reinstatement of two independent regulators, Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and chair Cathy A. Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, pending further review in lower courts. The unsigned order stated that "because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents."[19] However, the Court did not rule on the merits, with the order stating "The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power. But we do not ultimately decide in this posture whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within such a recognized exception; that question is better left for resolution after full briefing and argument."[20]

The decision was sharply criticized by Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that the ruling had effectively repealed Humphrey's Executor "by fiat", and that "nowhere is short-circuiting our deliberative process less appropriate than when the ruling requested would disrespect—by either overturning or narrowing—one of this Court's longstanding precedents".[19] Kagan also criticized the order's call-out to separate the Federal Reserve Board from other independent agencies, saying that this board's independence "rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on — which is to say it rests largely on Humphrey's."[21]

  1. ^ a b c "U.S. Reports: Humphrey's Executor v. U.S., 295 U.S. 602 (1935)". Library of Congress.
  2. ^ a b McKenna, Marian C. (2002). Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937. New York City: Fordham University Press. pp. 96–99. ISBN 0-8232-2154-7.
  3. ^ Quoted in Crane (2015), p. 1841.
  4. ^ Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935).
  5. ^ Humphrey's Executor, at 295 U.S. 602, 626 (1935)
  6. ^ Humphrey's Executor, at 295 U.S. 602, 628 (1935)
  7. ^ Erskine, Ellena (April 10, 2025). "Will the court overturn a 1930s precedent to expand presidential power, again?". SCOTUSblog. [I]n a world in which Humphrey's Executor and Morrison are nothing more than exceptions to the rule, then all of the litigation tends to reduce to whether the agency structure at issue is just like the exceptions or not.
  8. ^ a b Marimow, Ann E. (May 22, 2025). "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire independent regulators for now". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 22, 2025.
  9. ^ Quinn, Melissa (May 22, 2025). "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire labor board members while case proceeds". CBS News. Retrieved May 22, 2025.
  10. ^ Rubin, Jordan (May 22, 2025). "Divided Supreme Court backs Trump's power to fire independent agency members". MSNBC. Retrieved May 22, 2025.

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